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221e6b2
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I had made the very common mistake of thinking that marriage was a mode of absolute commonality and a breaking down of all boundaries, instead of understanding it simply as a pact between two people willing to be the guardians of each other's solitude.
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solitude
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Valeria Luiselli |
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6197048
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She wrote somewhere that photographs create their own memories, and supplant the past. In her pictures there isn't nostalgia for the fleeting moment, captured by chance with a camera. Rather, there's a confession: this moment captured is not a moment stumbled upon and preserved but a moment stolen, plucked from the continuum of experience in order to be preserved.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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91ed41e
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Perhaps no one really knows us who does not know the way we laugh.
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laughter
love
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Valeria Luiselli |
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e738f55
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When you read words like that in a book, beautiful words, a powerful but fleeting emotion ensues. And you also know that soon, it'll all be gone: the concept you just grasped and the emotion it produced. Then comes a need to possess that strange, ephemeral afterglow, and to hold on to that emotion. So you reread, underline, and perhaps even memorize and transcribe the words somewhere--in a notebook, on a napkin, on your hand.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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a8c8cc7
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El problema con los criollos, y hasta en mayor grado con las criollas, es que estan convencidos de que merecen una mejor vida de la que tienen. La mente criolla esta convencida de que bajo la corteza del craneo porta un diamante que alguien tendria que descubrir, pulir y poner en un cojin rojo, para que los demas se admiren, se pasmen, se den cuenta de lo que siempre se habian perdido.
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mexicans
méxico
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Valeria Luiselli |
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cca5e7e
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Writer and former Border Patrol officer Francisco Cantu has written poignantly about these death maps and all the "clearly marked ghosts" that dot the wide deserts in the southern United States."
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Valeria Luiselli |
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36e94a0
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stopped acting as if I was privileged enough to worry about corporate ethics, and signed the contract
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Valeria Luiselli |
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5566811
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Numbers and maps tell horror stories, but the stories of deepest horror are perhaps those for which there are no numbers, no maps, no possible accountability, no words ever written or spoken.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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4d382ed
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He fell into a solemn silence, which he only eventually broke to say, "I think I've become a terrible person. In fact, I've become a reptile. Do you know that reptiles are stupid because almost their entire brain capacity is used to feel fear?"
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reptiles
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Valeria Luiselli |
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8f9973c
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But this face, my face, like all faces, is not only a collection of traces- it's also the first draft of a future face... In my young face I instinctively read a first wrinkle of doubt, a first smile of indifference: lines of a story I'll rewrite and understand on a future reading.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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7b254a7
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The following day his outline appeared in white chalk on the asphalt. Did the hand of the person who skirted the coastline of his body tremble? The city, its sidewalks: an enormous blackboard- instead of numbers, we add up bodies.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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3756241
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Our final hours together were predictable: the temperature of the arguments rising, the almost comic melodrama of the play beginning. Faces, masks. One shouting, the other crying; and then, change masks. For one, two, three, six hours, until the world finally falls apart: tomorrow, this Sunday, next Wednesday, Christmas. But in the end, a strange peace, gathered from who knows what rotten gut.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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3cb72f5
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The process by which a child is asked questions during the intake interview is called screening, a term that is as cynical as it is appropriate: the child a reel of footage, the translator-interpretor an obsolete apparatus used to channel that footage, the legal system a screen, itself too worn out, too filthy and tattered to allow any clarity, any attention to detail. Stories often become generalized, distorted, appear out of focus.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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c96a52e
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A mi no me afligen esa clase de preocupaciones porque nunca tuve cualidades efimeras. Yo solo tengo de las permanentes .
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Valeria Luiselli |
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c47d703
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caminando por una misma calle que, sospecho, es la superposicion de muchas calles. Se, ademas, que algunos recuerdos son elaboracion posterior: fantasias labradas durante una charla... Recordar, releer: transformar el recuerdo: sutil alquimia que nos concede el don de reinventar nuestros pasado.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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8f15469
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Because - how do you explain that it is never inspiration that drives you to tell a story, but rather a combination of anger and clarity? How do you say: No, we do not find inspiration here, but we find a country that is as beautiful as it is broken, and we are somehow now part of it, so we are also broken with it, and feel ashamed, confused, and sometimes hopeless, and are trying to figure out how to do something about all that.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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95d9990
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The process by which a child is asked questions during the intake interview is called screening, a term that is as cynical as it is appropriate: the child a reel of footage, the translator-interpreter an obsolete apparatus used to channel that footage, the legal system a screen, itself too worn out, too filthy and tattered to allow any clarity, any attention to detail. Stories often become generalized, distorted, appear out of focus.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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76b90e2
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It's strange how concepts can erode so easily, how words we once used lightly can alchemize abruptly into something toxic.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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fe7e3f0
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More than eighty thousand undocumented children from Mexico and the Northern Triangle, but mostly from the latter, had been detained at the US southern border in just the previous six or seven months. All those children were fleeing circumstances of unspeakable abuse and systematic violence, fleeing countries where gangs had become parastates, had usurped power and taken over the rule of law. They had come to the United States looking for p..
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Valeria Luiselli |
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29edd44
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When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams--this may be madness.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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d8dfd25
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New families, like young nations after violent wars of independence or social revolutions, perhaps need to anchor their beginnings in a symbolic moment and nail that instant in time. That night was our foundation, it was the night where our chaos became a cosmos.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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f10a0d6
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The most important thing in this life, Master Oklahoma used to say at the end of each session, is to have a destiny.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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e550fb7
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Er zijn dingen die je alleen maar kunt begrijpen als je ze in retrospectief bekijkt, wanneer er jaren overheen gegaan zijn en het verhaal al is afgelopen. Voordat dat het geval is, en zolang het verhaal nog verder gaat, is het enige wat je kunt doen het steeds opnieuw vertellen terwijl het zich ontwikkelt, zich opsplitst, met zichzelf in de knoop raakt. Want voor iets begrepen kan worden moet het vele keren vermeld worden, in veel verschill..
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Valeria Luiselli |
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e6ca26b
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That's the way literary recognition works, at least to a certain degree. It's all a matter of rumor, a rumor that multiplies like a virus until it becomes a collective affinity.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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89dc421
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Our penultimate lot, ladies and gentlemen, exudes an air of mystical melancholy. The tooth itself is crocodilian, but its aura is almost angelic. Note the curve; it is like a wing in ascent. Its owner, Mr. Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges, was a man of average height. His short, thin legs supported a torso, which was at once solid and svelte. His head was the size of a small coconut, and he had a slender, flexible neck. He was a pantheis..
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Valeria Luiselli |
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f32b931
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However differently we spoke the language, as Spanish speakers, our close ties with Latin and Greek gave us a sense of superiority: we were the heirs to a noble linguistic past. English, in contrast, was the barbaric bastard son of Latin, constantly gloating over its discoveries: the demiurgic function of articles, inventing the world by enunciating it.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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ec17cac
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In the small glass box the auctioneer held high lay waiting for me the sacred teeth of none other than Marilyn Monroe.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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a4be7ef
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My luck was without equal, my life was a poem, and I was certain that one day, someone was going to write the beautiful tale of my dental autobiography. End of story.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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d63faed
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Baldy fell for Dakota. She fell for his bathtub. They began a torturous, dangerous, multilateral relationship.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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9d310b8
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En la lista de causas vino primero el planeta Saturno, y un siglo despues se sumaron a la lista el ocio, el exceso de conocimiento, las brujas, los magos y Dios. Para las causas divinas hubo siempre antidotos terrenales.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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c81942a
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Escritor es el que borra...Cortar, podar: encontrar una forma que ya estaba ahi" Pero las palabras no son plantas y, en todo caso, los jardines son para los poetas de corazon: los de corazon ajardinado. La prosa es para los que tienen espiritu de albanil."
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Valeria Luiselli |
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d04b6a2
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Algunos han comparado la experiencia de este primer aprendizaje con el extasis de un demiurgo que produce un universo, nombrandolo.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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0b6bf7d
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It's never clear what turns a space into a home, and a life-project into a life.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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c684bec
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Algunos periodicos anuncian la llegada de los ninos indocumentados como se anunciaria una plaga biblica: !Cuidado! !Las langostas! Cubriran la faz de la tierra hasta que no quede exento ni un milimetro --estos amenazantes ninos y ninas de piel tostada, de ojos rasgados y cabellera de obsidiana. Caeran del cielo, sobre nuestros coches, sobre nuestros techos, en nuestros jardines recien podados. Caeran sobre nuestras cabezas. Invadiran nuestr..
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Valeria Luiselli |
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a6c7b9b
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They weren't looking for the American Dream, as the narrative usually goes. The children were merely looking for a way out of their daily nightmare.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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d74a8d1
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Perhaps the right word is recognition, in the sense of re-cognizing, knowing again, for a second or third time, like an echo of a knowledge, which brings acknowledgment, and possibly forgiveness.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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c2d1439
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Genetics is a science full of gods, Mr. Sanchez.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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65950e5
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Mouths open to the sun, they sleep.
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opening-lines
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Valeria Luiselli |
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a0aa6aa
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Conversations, in a family, become linguistic archaeology. They build the world we share, layer it in a palimpsest, give meaning to our present and future. The question is, when, in the future, we dig into our intimate archive, replay our family tape, will it amount to a story? A soundscape? Or will it all be sound rubble, noise, and debris?
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Valeria Luiselli |
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ec7865c
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Sargasso Sea, which, the boy says, gets its name from the enormous quantities of sargassum seaweed that float there, almost motionless, trapped by currents that circle clockwise.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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b0f496d
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line of an Ezra Pound poem I've never quite understood or remembered the title of: "Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea."
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Valeria Luiselli |
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ddc8852
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A pesar de que nada debe ni puede ser tomado a la ligera cuando pides permiso para vivir en un pais que no es el tuyo, pues estas siempre en una posicion vulnerable, y mas aun tratandose de Estados Unidos, es inevitable ignorar el tono casi enternecedor de las preocupaciones del cuestionario de la Green Card y sus visiones de las grandes amenazas del futuro: libertinaje, comunismo, flaqueza moral. El cuestionario tiene la inocencia de lo re..
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Valeria Luiselli |
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11eba95
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Por supuesto hay muchas muertes a lo largo de una vida. La mayoria de las personas no se dan cuenta. Creen que se mueren una vez y ya. Pero basta con poner un poco de atencion para darse cuenta de que uno va y se muere a cada rato. No es un modo poetico de hablar. No estoy diciendo que el alma esto y el alma aquello, sino que un dia uno cruza una calle y lo arrolla un carro; otro dia se queda dormido en la tina y hasta ahi quedo y otro, rue..
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Valeria Luiselli |
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e95774f
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I read them like I had to finish an infinite bowl of lukewarm soup.
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Valeria Luiselli |